Sugar Cane And Indigenous People - Sucre Ethique

12At first sight, the objectives of the new large scale projects may be impressive. However,one has to doubt whether the interests of the people living in the area of the newirrigation schemes were seriously considered in the planning process and whetherpastoral livelihood strategies were ever seen as a viable alternative. The local pastoralgroups were either evicted from their lands, or they were resettled without adequatecompensation. Quite obviously, the pastoral population did not participate in projectplanning. According to pastoralists who were interviewed, many people in the area of thenew schemes feel totally excluded from these developments in the name ofdevelopment, and they are afraid of the socio-economic impact that a massive influx oflabor migrants from the highlands will have (Müller-Mahn et al. 2010). Huge settlementprograms in the vicinity of the new irrigation schemes are already under way in order torelocate the new migrants and the displaced Afar communities.Photo 4: Afar woman picking cotton as daily labourerAlthough the current interventions may offersome benefits for few pastoralists who findwork on the plantations, they are framed byan official discourse that disregards thecontribution of pastoralists to the nationaleconomy.As a consequence of the new developmentschemes in the pastoral areas, a growingnumber of Afar and Karrayu pastoralists aregradually losing their pastoral productionbasis, and are forced to search foralternatives by supplementing theirlivelihoods with subsistence orientedcultivation of maize and sorghum and/orlow-paid wage labour like the picking ofcotton (Photo 4).Additionally, under conditions of increasingland scarcity and the monetarization of land,violent conflicts among Afar clans havebecome more frequent and threaten thesocial fundaments of the clan society.It can be concluded that pastoral vulnerability is increasing as in the process ofagricultural industrialization new risks are produced, that gradually undermine pastoralcoping capacities and resilience (Rettberg 2010). The negative costs of modernizationand national food security have to be paid by the pastoralists.EthiclIndigenous People-ETHICAL-SUGAR